Simple Guide to Setting Up Woocommerce Coupons

An updated guide to how to use Woocommerce Coupons can be found here.

Unfortunately, and I use that term sparingly, Woocommerce has removed many of the options below, such as percentage based per product discounts. I assume this is an effort to sell a more robust paid extension. Bummer.

The following is a walk through of how to setup coupons in Woocommerce.

If you’re not familiar with Woocommerce, it’s the e-commerce platform for WordPress. If you’re looking to run a fully powered online store, I’d highly recommend giving it a whirl. Need help? I’m here for you.

To get started, navigate to Woocommerce > Coupons in WordPress. You’ll need to have Woocommerce installed already, of course.

Let’s create a new coupon. Click Add Coupon near the top of the page.

Create a Coupon

1. In the Coupon Code field, enter the actual code you’ll provide to users. Something like discount2014 or theshippingisonus.
2. The Description field is optional, and used only for internal purposes.
3. On the General panel, we have the following options:
   • Discount type can be any of the following:

     Cart Discount

     A fixed amount that gets applied to a customer’s entire cart / order.

     Cart % Discount

     A percentage off of a customer’s entire order.

     Product Discount

     A fixed amount that gets deducted from a specific product (more on that later).

     Product % Discount

     A percentage off a specific product’s price.

     Sign Up Fee Discount

     If you’ve got the Woocommerce Subscriptions plugin installed, this is an option to give them a fixed amount off of any sign up fees you’ve indicated in that plugin’s settings page.

     Sign Up Fee % Discount

     Same as above, but a percentage off the fee instead of a fixed price.

     Recurring Discount

     This also requires the Subscriptions plugin, and gives them a fixed discount off of any monthly, annual, etc. fees for their subscription.

     Recurring % Discount

     Same as above but a percentage rather than a fixed price.

   • Coupon amount Whether it’s a percentage or fixed amount discount, enter the value here. Don’t use any currency symbols or the % sign, however you can use decimal points and thousands separators. For example, if you’re using US dollars, valid entries would be 10 (for $10 or 10%), 33.3 (for $33.30 or 33.3%) and 10,000 (for $10,000).
   • Allow free shipping If you want the coupon to trigger free shipping. As per the notes in that setting, you need to have free shipping setup as a shipping method in Woocommerce > Settings > Shipping.
   • Apply before tax In my opinion this should always be checked, because you don’t want to charge customers tax on the full amount of an item they’re not actually paying the full amount for.
   • Coupon expiry date When you want it to expire. This is also optional.
4. On the Usage Restrictions, you can setup the following limitations for the coupon:
   • Minimum spend If you want to require they spend a certain amount in total before the coupon can be applied. Typically recommended, particularly for fixed amount coupons. If you have a coupon for $10, you’d want them to at least spend $10 before it could be applied.
   • Individual use only Tick this if you don’t want the coupon to be able to be combined with any other coupons.
   • Exclude sale items If you’ve already got some items on sale, you may not want to allow further discounts, particularly if that might mean you’d lose money on the item after the sale price + coupon were used.
   • Products You can type in the name of one or more products here to limit the coupon so that it will only work if that product is in the user’s cart. Just start typing a product’s name into the box, it will show up and you can click on it to add it.
   • Exclude products Similarly, you can create a list of products this coupon cannot be used on.
   • Product categories Alternatively, you can choose an entire product category to limit the coupon to.
   • Exclude categories A list of categories that, if a product is in one of them, the coupon cannot be used for.
   • Email restrictions You can use this to only allow the coupon to work for people who complete the checkout process with a specific email address. Useful if you want to give a specific person or organization a discount.
5. Finally, the Usage Limits tab allows further fine tuning of how a coupon is applied:
   • Usage limit per coupon Leave this blank for no limit (often best used in conjunction with a coupon that has an expiration date). Enter in any whole number to set a specific limit on how many times the coupon can be used total. Good for “To the first 100 customers” type of offers.
   • Usage limit per person Enter a number here if you want to limit the coupon to any one particular user. Note that if you allow guest checkout and a user is smart enough to use a different email address, they can get around this limitation.
6. Once you’ve got all of the settings configured the way you’d like, all you have to do is Publish the coupon. As with Posts and Pages, you can leave a coupon as a draft (or change its status to draft at any point in the future, useful if you want to save a Christmas coupon for next year, etc.), or publish it at a specific date in the future.

Now that you’ve got your coupon all setup, all you need to do is provide it to your users.

You can send them an email, post it to an advertisement, or whatever you can dream up. You could also go to Woocommerce > Settings > General and tick the Enable Sitewide Store Notice Text option. A new box will appear, and you could enter in something like “Save 10% through this Friday, use coupon code 10TILFRIDAY”.

Find this useful? As always, a little love on Google+ goes a long way.

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